Increasingly in the global corporate environment, collaboration, both local and remote, is essential and requires interactivity between participants to a degree beyond the current capabilities of conferencing and teleconferencing technologies. The significance of group ideation and remote collaboration in the corporate environment has made the meeting room ubiquitous. For example, by one estimate, there are approximately 67 million meeting rooms worldwide. Further, the individuals participating in meetings are increasingly reliant on mobile user devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, e-readers, etc. to carry digital content.
Issues individuals face within these collaborative meeting environments include the lack of a staple product to display, present, and collaborate around content and the myriad connected adapters such as HDMI, VGA, DisplayPort, MiniDisplayPort, Thunderbolt, USB, etc. necessary to achieve connectivity with user devices. Existing collaborative presentation systems rely on a direct cabled or wired connection connected physically to the users' computers or tablets. Existing wireless presentation systems require software packages to be downloaded to enable laptops or computers to communicate with existing presentation systems. The software packages may force a user device to change the settings and configure the user device for specific formats or applications to be used with the user devices. Individuals or corporate policies are generally averse to downloading unfamiliar software that may change the format of their devices or the characteristics of the content they are sharing in the collaborative environment. Translation software may be needed with tablets and smartphones to format the data being utilized to meet some of the presentation system's throughput requirements. The formatting may enforce undesirable changes on the look and feel of the presented data.
Currently, matrix-switching systems require a hard-wired or cabled/wired connection to reliably transmit and receive the required bandwidth of data to and from the devices connected thereon. In addition, accessing and controlling the peripheral devices connected to typical wired matrix-switching systems requires multiple input devices. That is, currently, no single command and control device can control the data presentation, the matrix-switching and the connected peripheral devices.
While wired connections may be capable of handling the large amount of bandwidth needed to send and receive information between all connected devices in a conferencing environment, corresponding wireless systems do not. Due to the limited bandwidth capabilities of currently available wireless systems, wireless applications cannot handle the amount of two-way information being sent from hard-wired matrix switches to peripheral computing and multimedia devices. That is, conventional wireless technology does not support a broadband signal with the necessary bandwidth requirements to send unbuffered and uncompressed collaborative multimedia data without latent pauses, causing disruption of the ideation, communication or sharing of data and information. For example, wireless systems typically achieve transmission rates of 700 Mbps and are not capable of transmission rates greater than 3 Gbps necessary to maintain uncompressed high-definition video conferencing (HDVC).
Cabling and wired systems create a great deal of installation and life-cycle costs to configure and reconfigure a meeting room (e.g. floor coring or trenching, inserting floor stubs or poke-thru devices, installing shallow-raised or raised flooring, cable trays, behind-wall wireways, etc.). Connecting all peripheral devices to a matrix-switching system requires a large amount of wire that often has to be hidden and trenched to give a clean aesthetic look to the meeting room. Wiring a meeting room is inconvenient and costly; problems compounded when moving or modifying meeting spaces resulting in opening up walls, floors, and ceilings to remove or add wires and cables. The effects are often disruptive and may cause meetings to take longer than necessary.
Currently, wireless connectivity is preferred over wired connectivity within corporations, educational facilities, and other types of organizations. However, currently available wireless presentation systems (e.g. Apple TV, InFocus LiteShow III, Barco Clickshare, etc.) are not collaborative and do not control multiple peripherals simultaneously. These wireless systems are designed for an individual to present or send content or data to a single peripheral device that is solely controlled by the individual. That is, to present a counterpoint during a meeting or presentation by taking over a connected peripheral device, a first individual must surrender control to a second individual; a wireless version of “passing the cord.”
Security issues prevent many facilities from using a wireless system for fear that the signal, communication, data, ideation, information, and the like, may be compromised by surveillance outside of the enclosed environment or other wireless security fears. Consequently, many collaborative workspaces default to wired infrastructures with cables and wires for connectivity to insure data and communication security. In today's work environment, where user device technologies allow for individuals and teams to access information and data immediately, a secure wireless environment is necessary for individuals and teams to communicate, share, collaborate and ideate around electronically presented data while simultaneously controlling access to the signal.